Withey: Life demanded strength from 1933’s new year’s baby

Leora McDonald (nee Roberge) today at 80 with her dog, Munchkin

Photograph by: Elizabeth Withey
, Edmonton Journal

EDMONTON - There’s this app called AgingBooth. For 99 cents, this “amazing face aging machine” can show you what you’ll look like decades from now. “Ready to face your future?” it asks, tempting, baiting.

AgingBooth is one of the top-selling apps in iPhone’s entertainment category, and that’s really no surprise. We’re all desperate to fast-forward, to know what time will do with our looks, our skin, our exterior.

But there’s no app to show us what time will do with our lives, our hearts, our interior. You have to wait it out.

“Baby Roberge” was a precious mystery when she arrived three minutes after midnight on Sunday, Jan. 1, 1933. Time had yet to write upon the pages of her book. She was the first baby born in Edmonton that year, the first child of northsiders Ernie and Emily Roberge. Her tiny, cherubic face graced the front page of the Edmonton Journal on Jan. 3.

The baby’s parents later named her Leora, which means “my light.” You could say she’s grown into the name, for, it is now, older and wiser, that Leora McDonald sees the world around her clearest.

Edmonton’s first baby of 1933 is still a proud northsider, and she doesn’t need some gimmicky face-aging app to show her what the future holds. She just celebrated her 80th birthday, has watched time etch wrinkles on her skin and scribble words onto the pages of her life.

Growing up, “we were big shots, we had a phone,” she recalls of her childhood in northeast Edmonton. They had an outhouse, too, and there was no running water. Leora, the oldest of nine children, spent “darn near” every evening gliding around the Highlands skating rink. She walked there in the dark, through the bush, past a dump. “That was some scary,” she says. “We were moving pretty fast.”

Leora’s parents were strict and, as a teen, she was rebellious, a smoker. She wanted to get out of the house and Art McDonald, an older guy, was her ticket.

In her own words, “the shots came later.”

She became a mom at 18, had six children over a period of 20 years. “I was always pregnant; it seemed I was pregnant my whole life. And never a break. No holidays, we could never afford that.”

Sometimes, life seemed to stand still for the hard-working mother, who raised her children in poverty. Her husband could not read or write but found some work building laths for plaster walls. He was inclined to drink, and often Leora was on her own parenting. She took odd jobs to make ends meet, had to choose between buying groceries and paying the power bill. They ate a lot of hamburger meat. “We never starved to death but there was never any extra, let’s put it that way.”

The book that is McDonald’s life is ink-stained, its spine cracked. But this great-grandmother stands tall, straight. She is careful with her words about her family, but her blue eyes don’t lie when you ask about how it was for her as a young mother.

“There were a lot of good times, but there were a lot of bad times,” she says, wiping away a tear with a tissue. “I appreciate it all a lot more now than I did then.”

Her husband died in 1998, of emphysema. The couple had been married 48 years. Leora keeps a gift from Art in her living room cabinet: artificial flowers he gave her after she had a surgery on her neck 15 years ago. The card he chose said, “Congratulations on your new baby.”

She shares her cosy bungalow with an adorably ratty dog named Munchkin, a cat, and one of her sons, an arrangement that suits everyone well. “I’m better off now than I ever was in my life,” she says.

Sister-in-law Marie Roberge, who is married to Leora’s youngest brother, can’t hide her admiration. “When I think of all the curveballs life has thrown her and how entitled young kids are, man, people could learn a lot from her.”

Every year, newspapers run a picture of the first baby born in that city that year. Snap: this minuscule alien face, wrinkly, fresh, dark eyes, swaddled, perhaps in its mother’s arms. The so-called 15 minutes of fame, and then off into the world, and no telling how it will all turn out.

Our city’s 1933 baby turned out strong and loyal, stoic and loving, tough on the outside and tender in the middle. She mall-walks, loves driving and listening to Jim Reeves and visiting her family. She’s a good mother, an example of what matters and what doesn’t and what it means to “face the future.” The world needs fewer silly phone apps, more Leoras.

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